Beyond the attention economy, true power lies in access to individuals
The TikTok ban and the future of personal privacy, control, and digital power
Hello, fellow voyagers. Today’s edition is about the role of social media in shaping the future of personal privacy, control, and digital power.
It was a sunny summer morning, and I was sitting at our tiny kitchen table—covered with the ubiquitous PVC oilcloth— dangling my feet and watching my mother cook. She wore her familiar blue house dress, her waist-long black hair tight in a bun at the base of her neck. The clerestory window of our little communist kitchen, facing the alley, was open. We lived on the ground floor, and the high-placed window kept prying eyes at bay but not prying ears. I’m not sure what went through my five-year-old head when I suddenly asked, ‘Mommy, who is this Ceausescu man you’re always talking about?’
It was an innocent question. I had no idea that the man with the neatly cropped salt-and-pepper wavy hair, buttoned-up shirt, and jacket, who struggled with rhotacism and was always on TV, was our dictator. My question hit my mother in all the wrong places. She dropped whatever she was doing at the kitchen sink, closed the kitchen window, and, before I could blink, she was staring into my eyes her face so close to mine they were almost touching: ‘Don’t ever ask this question again. Do you understand me? You could put us in jail!’
Like in any authoritarian regime, one of the most important currencies in communist Romania was information. Eavesdropping was a key tool for suppressing dissent and controlling the population. The Securitate, the communist secret police, employed regular citizens as informants. Anyone could be an informant: your spouse, child, or friendly neighbor walking by your kitchen window. The communist regime in 1980s Romania understood one simple truth: to have power over the masses, you must have access to the individual.
Beyond the attention economy: The rise of digital power
Just as authoritarian regimes use surveillance to maintain control, today’s digital platforms leverage access to individuals for economic gains, creating a new form of power: the attention economy. In capitalism, you must have access to the individual to dominate the market. Thanks to the technology we carry in our pockets, an industry of macro and micro influencers has sprouted, redefining advertising, reshaping cultural narratives, endowing ordinary individuals with extraordinary influence. But the attention economy goes two ways:
Users are engaged through content and algorithms, and their attention is farmed to generate income for digital platform owners and, hopefully, result in sales for advertisers.
Platforms must know users to engage them effectively. Automated tools collect and analyze user data, monitoring preferences, fears and behaviors. While my mother’s fear was rooted in an authoritarian regime, today, the surveillance economy holds similar power through access to individuals, whether for control, influence or change. Social media platforms have become the gateways to you and me.
The owners of social media platforms discovered the power of access to individuals almost two decades ago. While many have predicted the fall of social media and the age of the influencer for years, the ad-driven business model is booming. Millions have built lucrative careers through these platforms, but the power of social media goes far beyond the market.
The 2016 US presidential elections and the Cambridge Analytica scandal marked a turning point, showing how social media could be weaponized for political influence—50 million user profiles were harvested from Facebook in early 2014 and used ‘to build a system that could profile individual US voters, in order to target them with personalized political advertisements’. During the COVID-19 pandemic, these platforms became arenas of misinformation, fear-mongering, and public division. This trend continued after the pandemic, with public fights between ideological and political factions echoed by the public like an Ancient Greek chorus. Elon Musk recognized the trend and, in 2022, acquired Twitter—a platform that shapes political discourse. TikTok has emerged as a global powerhouse in recent years, becoming one of the top five most popular platforms worldwide after Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and WhatsApp. Yet its Chinese ownership has raised concerns about national security, culminating in a temporary US ban on January 19, 2025.
The TikTok ban highlights two realities:
Due to its global reach and massive user data, the Chinese-owned TikTok is regarded as a national security threat, as it allows a political and economic rival to gather intelligence about US citizens. In 2020, India banned TikTok, citing similar national security concerns, while the European Union’s GDPR laws set strict limits on user data collection and processing. In the 2024 Romanian presidential elections, an unknown far-right candidate gained popularity with the electorate in a matter of weeks via his TikTok channel leading to the annulment of the election results.
TikTok’s immense power makes it a valuable asset, akin to Twitter. Musk has proved that ownership of such a platform offers influence that transcends financial metrics.
Digital platforms tend to evolve into monopolies. Users gravitate toward large networks that provide global connectivity, investing significant time and effort into creating their digital presence. As such, platforms like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok dominate their space with little competition. When challengers arise, dominant platforms often consolidate their power through traditional monopolistic practices. Instagram’s acquisition by Facebook in 2012 exemplifies this trend. TikTok, however, has defied conventional Western monopolistic practices, offering users unprecedented creative freedom with better discoverability, wider reach, and more permissive algorithms.
Platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and X (formerly Twitter) provide freedom of speech, access to information and global communication on an unprecedented scale. Their informal digital networks sprout new ideas daily and distribute them via their synapses—communities wired by algorithms—while collecting and storing vast amounts of information about every individual. The communication ebbs and flows, dictated by macro and micro influencers and their objectives, as well as the algorithms serving the commercial interests of the platform owners. This resulted in a decentralized network of informal digital structures that are abstract in nature but have real-world impact—from consumption of natural resources in the form of infrastructure and energy to dictating market trends, cultural and political narratives, spreading mis/information, and granting immense power to those who own them.
An individual like Elon Musk can influence entire governments with a single tweet, as evidenced by the UK’s decision to monitor his posts; or influence presidential elections with his platform’s reach. Whoever grabs TikTok will hold even greater power. Beyond commerce and politics, these platforms’ data collection capabilities rival the intelligence networks of the past, mapping our entire existence.
In 2024, the case of Luigi Mangione—the 26-year-old suffering from debilitating back pain that raked him a mountain of healthcare debt—allegedly killed the CEO of the largest US health insurance company in downtown New York in broad daylight, shocking traditional media and the upper classes. In a remarkable moment in the history of digital platforms, the public response to the murder expressed in real-time across social media, revealed the beating heart of a whole nation fatally wounded by the inequalities of the US healthcare system. Many were shocked and disgusted at the grassroots support for an alleged killer, but the reaction revealed a deeper issue: the dehumanizing effects of profit-driven healthcare. The online conversation exposed the systemic mistreatment of those without means, leaving many elites unnerved by the digital pulse of a nation.
The case raised serious questions about the role of social media in radicalizing public opinion. Could our social media presence have legal consequences in the future?
The future of digital power
The race to control social media platforms begins a new era. Digital ownership now rivals traditional governance in influence. As invasive technologies become more sophisticated, society faces critical choices:
Will we allow these platforms to deepen inequalities and facilitate control?
Or can we harness their potential for collective good?
The tools that grant unprecedented access to individuals could liberate or oppress us.
In the book ‘1984’, surveillance invades every aspect of life. In ‘Minority Report’, predictive technology arrests people before crimes occur. Today’s algorithms may not be far behind with new technologies such as AI and Neuralink, which will further enhancing their reach and power. As Australia’s 2024 initiative to raise the age limit for social media users shows, governments are beginning to grapple with these challenges. But how else can we shape the future of these platforms?
Three years after I scared my mother in the kitchen, the communist regime fell. Unfortunately, my mother never got to enjoy her newly gained freedom because she got sick and died within one year. My mother’s fear was a response to a regime that sought control through surveillance. Today, as we confront the digital age, her story is a cautionary tale, reminding us that the power to access and influence individuals must be wielded with care. Giving others access to us comes with great rewards but also immense dangers. Social media platforms have the power to connect us and transform our world, but they could also recreate the oppressive mechanisms of past regimes in new, digital forms. What we choose now will determine whether these platforms lead us to a dystopia or a more equitable world. I, for one, would never want to live in a world where a five-year-old girl could put her parents in jail by asking the wrong questions.
P.S.: I don’t specialize in journalistic social media coverage. This article stemmed from my own reflections and concerns after reading the news and observing how social media platforms are used to leverage economic, political and personal power, as well as to disseminate ideas, control discourse and—starting with the Luigi Mangione case—potentially control and surveil individuals based on their social media usage.
After I wrote this post, I found a great article from
who is in a much better position to comment on the landscape of social media. This is an article about a group of people who want to free social media from the shackles of billionaire ownership.Today, a group of former Twitter users who are fed up by the platform’s decline under billionaire control, are launching a new campaign to transform social media into a public good, free from profit-driven incentives, venture capital pressure, and politically-motivated censorship.—Taylor Lorenz
Here’s the link to the article, I think it will be a great follow-up read. I absolutely agree with the idea that social media should be a public good and I’ve been talking about this with friends and family for some time now.
P.P.S.: And because going down rabbit holes is almost second nature to me, here’s a second article that will give you an insight on how another influential culture uses social media: Japan is not ready for the culture wars by
.As someone who studied transcultural communication, now I’m fascinated by how local cultures influence the use of social media—a story for another time.
P.P.P.S.: If you’re wondering whether there will be social media in the future—it’s something I didn’t encounter in sci-fi novels yet—here’s a piece I wrote last year where social media is used by poor children to make a living in the year ∼2532 CE.
Ice
Hello my fellow voyagers🖖. Ice is a climate fiction short story. Two homeless siblings livestream their shenanigans for a living, but when they decide to go on a dream vacation with ice their lives take an unexpected turn.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot. We went largely unconcerned when that data was only being used for more specific advertising. But in the wrong hands it can be used for far more nefarious purposes. All the way to surveillance and control.
The owners of those platforms are realizing this, slowly taking advantage and, I would argue, are even becoming radicalized by their own platforms. At what point do we decide that much power shouldn’t be in the hands of private individuals? And certainly not in the hands of governments? Whose hands should they be in to ensure their use for the good?
Great commentary here, Claudia. It's so hard to make sense of the power and influence of these networks, you do a good job of putting it into perspective.